Five shows worth remembering

The best of 2001’s visual arts offerings

1. Out of Order: Mapping Social Space (Atlanta Contemporary Art Center). Curated by Susan Krane, this traveling show melded familiar names like Andreas Gursky and Peter Halley with intriguing work by lesser-known artists while treating the modern condition through architecture. One of the city’s best in 2001.

2. My Father by Angela West (Jackson Fine Art). This Dahlonega photographer, fresh from Yale, offered one of the most revealing, psychologically loaded documentary studies in a city flush with great photography. The exotic prey West charted? Not inner-city kids, Appalachian hillfolk or Indian street performers, but her own quixotic dad.

3. Vik Muniz: Repartee (Atlanta College of Art Gallery). This small gallery in the High Museum’s shadow continues to offer riches in lively contemporary art as evidenced by Sam Easterson’s humorous Swamp Sanctuary show this year as well as New York photographer Muniz’s delightful, evanescent work curated by Rebecca Dimling Cochran.

4. Deconstruction of American Icons: New Drawings by King by King Thackston (Swan Coach House Gallery). Laced with an amusingly morbid romance for the past, this impressive show of drawings brought unexpectedly heady ideas to a lyrical form.

5. Panoptic Mind: Untitled (Eyedrum). The installation was typically low-tech, but the array of video projects by both locals and far-flung artists showed how influential this space continues to be in bringing cutting-edge work to Atlantans.??